Acer Aspire 5043 WLMI Series Laptop - Prepping the System for Use
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The laptop comes preloaded with Microsoft's Windows XP Home operating system. When you first fire up the laptop you have to spend nearly forty minutes before you can actually begin to use it. The laptop is preloaded at the factory with the operating system, and after filling out all of the appropriate registration information, including the date and time zone settings, you spend nearly half an hour waiting for the system to finish installing devices, while staring forlornly at your virgin desktop that you are unable to use while the system installs all of its third party applications. The amount of preloaded branded software is a mistake, as the first thing most users will do is spend another half an hour to an hour removing it and replacing it with their preferred software, or perhaps removing it and not replacing it at all.
Once the system has rebooted it will prompt you to burn a backup of your system. This is a great idea and all users should do this to ensure the ability to reload a fully functional version of their system, with all of the programs and documents already loaded and waiting to be used. However, this feature is not done to protect the user as much as it is to eliminate the need to ship any CDs with the system.
For the most part this seems trivial when any reinstall of the operating would be greatly assisted by a re-installation of all the drivers and related software in one disk. However, should any these preloaded applications require an uninstall/ reinstall to restore functionality, you will be left facing the fact that you will need to reinstall the entire system back to day one to resolve the issue. Furthermore, if Windows requires a file from your installation CD to correct an issue you again will be forced to format and reload your entire operating system to accommodate this. In many situations the operating system has become corrupted a long time since a backup of irreplaceable documents and photos has occurred. A simple repair of Windows or the restoration of a few corrupted files would allow you back in to save your files -- but with this system, you are out of luck.
Once the system is fully loaded and you get a chance to poke around, an astonishing detail comes up. The 100 GB hard drive is pre-partitioned into two separate pieces. Not many manufacturers do this straight from the factory, and this revelation was a pleasant surprise. However, you then notice the other detail. Both partitions are formatted using FAT32. This was really surprising. The NTFS file system is certainly far more secure and versatile than its antiquated FAT brothers and its lack of implementation is rather confusing. Since the release of Windows XP nearly five years ago it quickly became the standard method of formatting a hard disk, and any Windows upgrade on an older system will recommend conversion to NTFS over the FAT system. This surprising detail will no doubt confound many a user that is not aware of how to convert the file system in Windows or what third party utilities (ie. Partition Magic) may exist out there to fulfill this need. Many would no doubt be left scratching there heads as to why the PC is not performing or capable of many of the feats they would expect from such a robust hardware layout.
In the price competitive world of the major PC manufacturers, every opportunity to trim even a few pennies off the price of computer systems is seen as an advantage regardless of the cost to the end user.
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